The scorn heaped upon Hillary Clinton for continuing to campaign despite the near-impossibility of victory is, I suspect, related to the nature of her constituency and of the people criticizing her.

Old, working-class, white and rural: hardly the sort of people whom national political reporters, being young-ish and upper-middle-class and urban, take seriously. (The whiteness they have in common, but of a different sort.)

Were the candidates' positions reversed, the same journalists would rightly praise Obama for refusing to quit, for forcing the party establishment to acknowledge the young and dark-skinned and liberal. But instead we have the Hillary Deathwatch, because who cares about poor old white folks who live in the country?

Some defeats are better than others for our democracy. When Hillary Clinton finally loses, I'll remember her as a winner.